A Dance Minute

Dance Minute from darwin grosse on Vimeo.

During the Spring Quarter, I took an "Expanded Cinema" class taught by Trace Reddell and Jim Lavita. One of our assignments was to create a short piece using source material provided by 3rd Law Dance/Theater, featuring choreography by Katie Elliott. I used this section, which featured a duet, and created a Max/MSP/Jitter program that allowed me to manipulate the colorspace and motion characteristics of the visuals, and would use the movement of the dancers to generate a simple ambient soundtrack (using realtime controls).

I recorded the result, shown here. The motion manipulation turned out to really enhance the pauses between movements, and the color manipulations make the pauses seem to "flame up"; making for some beautiful visuals. The soundtrack isn't as successful as the visuals, but you can decide for yourself.

I'm hoping to work with 3rd Law in the future to do some of this live, and we've submitted the work for inclusion in a film-about-dance festival. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Thanks to Jim Lavita, Katie Elliott and 3rd Law Dance/Theater for permission to use this video and to post the results here.

[ddg]